Ask.fm: is there a way to make it safe?

Ask.fm is a social networking site with 60 million users, around half of them under 18. It's a place where kids can gossip without adults around. But lately the playground atmosphere has turned nasty and it has been linked to a spate of teenage suicides

Ask.fm is a kind of giant, instant and anonymous online game of truth-or-dare. Photograph: Matt Stevens/PA

The social networking headlines this week have been mostly Twitter's: anonymous threats of violence, rape and death; well-known women including a campaigner, an MP, a TV historian, columnists and writers; complaints, boycotts, arrests.

But far from the media spotlight on the San Francisco-based site and its high-profile users, another service has now been linked to up to half a dozen deaths. And unless you are a teenager, or a teenager's parent, you will quite possibly never even have heard of it.

Last Friday, Hannah Smith, aged 14, was found hanged in her bedroom in Lutterworth, Leicestershire, by her sister Jo, 16. Her father, Dave, said she had been savagely bullied on the question-and-answer website Ask.fm.

"I have just seen the abuse my daughter got from people on Ask.fm and the fact that these people can be anonymous is wrong," Smith, 45, wrote on his Facebook page.

Based in Riga, Latvia, Ask.fm was launched in June 2010. It builds on a US-based predecessor called Formspring, offering a website and a mobile app on which users first create a profile (you need a name, email address and date of birth) and then invite friends and strangers to ask them questions – anonymously if they so choose, and almost all do.

Many members promote their Ask.fm profiles on their Facebook and Instagram accounts, further boosting the number of questions they get asked. Their answers, which can include photographs and videos, appear both on their profiles and on a live feed of responses accessible to anyone with an Ask.fm account.

The service's popularity, especially among teens, is staggering. In June, Ask.fm announced it had 60 million registered users, up from barely 5m in April last year. Its iPhone app is consistently in the top 10 downloads on Apple's app store, often ahead of better-known services such as YouTube or Twitter.

According to Mark and Ilja Terebin, two of the site's founders, interviewed in June by the technology site CNET, Ask.fm recorded 13bn page views from 180m unique visitors in April, and is currently adding 200,000 new members a day.

The service is now present in 150 countries, with particular concentrations of users – each of whom spends, on average, 100 minutes a month on the site – in the US, UK, Brazil, Russia, Germany, France, Turkey, Poland, Italy and France.

You can see the appeal. Teens like Ask.fm because it's a largely adult-free chat and gossip zone, a place to hang out and mess around, incognito if they fancy, a long way from the more supervised, constraining environs of, say, Facebook.

Ask.fm says that around 50% of registered users are under the age of 18. Hang out on the site for a while, though, and it seems the percentage must be considerably higher than that; it feels like being back in the playground.

Like the playground, you get a bit of everything. Many of the questions posed on Ask.fm are plainly harmless teen chat: "What's your worst primary school memory?" "Tu fais quoi ce mercredi?" "Last movie that made you cry?" "Are you afraid of the dentist?" "Fave 1D [One Direction] member?"

Some, you can see, open the door to something potentially less innocuous: "Thoughts on Charlotte and Haylee?" "Who dyou hate most in [your class]?" "Photo 39 [or 26, or 57] on your camera roll?", "Your hawt! See your nipples?", "Ho your not the innocent little [name] you used to be are you? how many boys u been with?"

At this point, Ask.fm becomes a kind of giant, instant – and, critically, anonymous – online truth-or-dare, with all its attendant consequences. Because like the playground, there's bullying on Ask.fm.

These words were on the second profile I clicked on yesterday: "stop trying to act lyk your popular no one even fuckign likes you...not even your 'best friends'....so you should just go and shut up and sit in a fucking corner by yourself …"

Some is even more brutal. Among the comments left on Hannah Smith's profile were "cow", "fat slag" "ugly fuck" and "self harmin cunt". One user said she should "go die, evry1 wuld be happy", another recommended: "do us all a favour n kill ur self". Someone told her "no1 would care if ya died u cretin".

Hannah's father is in little doubt that it was this kind of abuse that led her to take her life (the thought does not seem to make much difference to some Ask.fm members. On the profile of a different, unrelated Hannah Smith yesterday, an anonymous user posted: "Yoooou slaagggggg drop dedddddd".)

Hannah Smith's death has been linked to online bullying on Ask.fm. Photograph: Facebook

Hannah's death is not the first to be linked to Ask.fm. Two Irish girls, Ciara Pugsley, 14, and Erin Gallagher, 13, took their lives last September and November after being subjected to sustained anonymous bullying on the site.

In April, Josh Unsworth, 15, from Lancashire, was found hanged in his parent's garden after complaining of abusive messages ("You really are a freak", "you deserve sick things to happen to you") on the same site over several months.

Another Lancashire schoolboy, 16-year-old Anthony Stubbs, killed himself in January; his family have said both his girlfriend and cousin have since received "horrible" abuse on Ask.fm. Friends of Jessica Laney, a Florida teenager who hanged herself in her bedroom last December, have said they are convinced constant anonymous bullying on Ask.fm pushed her to it.

Calls for the site to be shut down are, perhaps understandably, starting to multiply. The Irish government has asked Latvia to investigate it; the Maryland attorney general, Douglas Gansler, urged advertisers to take their money elsewhere. "This website," he said bluntly, "is putting children at risk."

In the UK, petitions on change.org and the government's e-petition website calling for Ask.fm to be closed down are gathering signatures, many from increasingly fraught parents.

"How many more teenagers will kill themselves because of online abuse before something is done?" Hannah's father asked the Daily Mirror yesterday.

"These sick people are just able to go online and hide behind a mask of anonymity to abuse vulnerable teenagers. We've lost Hannah in the most horrendous way. It's time something was done so no other family has to go through this."

Ciara Pugsley's father, Jonathan, told the Irish Independent that Hannah's suicide was "just heartbreaking. I know exactly what the Smith family are going through right now. This is a site where people can post anonymously whatever they want, and simply get away with it."

Ask.fm's five co-founders are not very forthcoming. Several have argued that the "negativity" on Ask.fm is merely a reflection of society's failings, and of a lack of proper internet education. On his own Ask.fm profile, Mark Terebin said last year that media criticism in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada and New Zealand over the past 12 months had largely been misplaced.

"It is necessary to go deeper to find a root of a problem," he said. "Ask.fm is just a tool that helps people to communicate, same as any other social network, same as a phone, same as piece of paper and pen. Don't blame a tool."

Another co-founder, Klavs Sinka, said: "We created Ask.fm as an attractive way for people to communicate with each other. From the beginning, we have tried to create tools with which to fight and prevent publishing of unwanted content … However, despite all our efforts, we cannot completely prevent users from having a negative psychological impact on one another."

In a rare interview in May, co-founder and CEO Ilja Terebin said the site's "main public is teenagers, and it is often a problematic and aggressive target market. It is very hard to get rid of this altogether."

He claimed young people "lack attention, mainly because parents are doing other things … When they come to sites like these, they start trolling themselves so their peers start protecting them. In this absurd way, they get the attention."

Speaking to the site ArcticStartup, Terebin insisted that Ask.fm's automatic and manual moderation systems were constantly on the lookout for pornography, abuse and other types of content which is then deleted, or the user blocked. He also pointed out that users can block anonymous questions in their privacy settings.

He did concede, however, that moderation was "easier to do with pictures and video … It is much harder with text, as we have 30m questions and 30m answers every single day. It is like trying to control Gmail."

A spokeswoman for Ask.fm said the company had contacted Leicestershire police and would cooperate with the investigation into Hannah Smith's death, which it called "a true tragedy".

Ask.fm "would like to convey our deepest condolences to her family and friends," it added in a statement. "Ask.fm actively encourages our users and their parents to report any incidences of bullying, either by using the in-site reporting button, or via our contact page. All reports are read by our team of moderators to ensure that genuine concerns are heard and acted upon immediately."

The company said it was "committed to ensuring that Ask.fm remains a safe, fun environment" and insisted it was "fully compliant with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act."

You do not have to spend long on Ask.fm to see that this does not seem to be working. Campaigners remain unconvinced. Anthony Smythe, managing director of the anti-bullying charity BeatBullying, says Ask.fm has become "a platform for cyberbullying". No matter what the site claimed, he says, "the protection is not there. This is not a safe website for children to use."

Ask.fm needs to put substantially more resources into moderating its site, Smythe says, and on intervening fast when it spots abuse. The charity would also like to see clear information and advice on-screen for users who are being bullied, as well as a single, prominent and easy-to-use "panic button".

One of the biggest issues for teenagers and parents, Smythe says, is the time it takes for abusive content to be removed from many social networking sites: "Often, material can stay up there for a very long time, causing enormous distress. With Ask.fm, it's almost impossible to get it taken down."

In conjunction with other charities, BeatBullying wants a "concerted strategy" and "real leadership" from government on the whole issue of cyberbullying. General awareness of the problem needs raising, intervention in the event of abuse needs to be "massively speeded up", children need educating about the harm online abuse can do, parents must be helped to "have those conversations" with their offspring, and deterrents for those who do abuse have to be real.

"People are starting to realise, lately, that the online world can be a very, very nasty place," Smythe says. "We're all going to have to work together if that's going to change."

•Comments for this piece will be activated on Wednesday morning.

• This article was amended on 6 August 2013 to clarify that anonymous questions can be blocked on Ask.fm.